“Exposed to the elements, complete skeletonization can occur in two weeks. Eleven or twelve days under the right circumstances.”
“So at any time…I’m two weeks from being bones.”
“It’s a quashing thought, isn’t it?”
“Major quash.”
Having seen more than enough of the dead man, I directed the flashlight at the items that he evidently had arranged on the floor around himself before pulling the trigger. A California driver’s license with photo identification. A paperback Bible. An ordinary white business envelope on which nothing was written or typed. Four snapshots in a neatly ordered row. A small ruby-red glass of the type that usually contains votive candles, though no candle was in this one.
Learning to live with nausea, trying to will myself to recall the scent of roses, I crouched for a closer look at the driver’s-license photo. In spite of the decomposition, the cadaver’s face had sufficient points of similarity to the face on the license to convince me that they were the same.
“Leland Anthony Delacroix,” I said.
“Don’t know him.”
“Thirty-five years old.”
“Not anymore.”
“Address in Monterey.”
“Why’d he come here to die?” Bobby wondered.
In hope of finding an answer, I turned the light on the four snapshots.
The first showed a pretty blonde of about thirty, wearing white shorts and a bright yellow blouse, standing on a marina dock against a backdrop of blue sky, blue water, and sailboats. Her gamine smile was appealing.
The second evidently had been taken on a different day, in a different place. This same woman, now in a polka-dot blouse, and Leland Delacroix were sitting side by side at a redwood picnic table. His arm was around her shoulders, and she was smiling at him as he faced the camera. Delacroix appeared to be happy, and the blonde looked like a woman in love.
“His wife,” Bobby said.
“Maybe.”
“She’s wearing a wedding ring in the picture.”
The third snapshot featured two children: a boy of about six and an elfin girl who could have been no older than four. In swimsuits, they stood beside an inflatable wading pool, mugging for the camera.
“Wanted to die surrounded by memories of his family,” Bobby suggested.
The fourth snapshot seemed to support that interpretation. The blonde, the children, and Delacroix stood on a green lawn, the kids in front of their parents, posed for a portrait. The occasion must have been special. Even more radiant here than in the other photos, the woman wore a summery dress and high heels. The little girl flashed a gap-toothed smile, clearly delighted by her outfit of white shoes, white socks, and a frilly pink dress flaring over petticoats. So freshly scrubbed and combed that you could almost smell the soap, the boy wore a blue suit, white shirt, and red bow tie. In an army uniform and an officer’s cap — his rank not easy to determine, perhaps a captain — Delacroix was the definition of pride.
Precisely because the subjects were so visibly happy in these shots, the effect of the photos was inexpressibly sad.
“They’re standing in front of one of these bungalows,” Bobby noted, indicating the background of the fourth snapshot.
“Not one of them.
“How can you tell?”
“Gut feeling.”
“So they lived here once?”
“And he came back to die.”
“Why?”
“Maybe…this was the last place he was ever happy.”
Bobby said, “Which also means this was where it all started going wrong.”
“Not just for them. For all of us.”
“Where do you think the wife and kids are?”
“Dead.”
“Gut feeling again?”
“Yeah.”
“Me too.”
Something glittered inside the small red votive-candle glass. I prodded it with the flashlight, tipping it over. A woman’s wedding and engagement rings spilled out onto the linoleum.
These items were all Delacroix had left of his beloved wife, other than a few photographs. Perhaps I was reaching too far for meaning, but I thought he had chosen the votive-candle holder to contain the rings because this was a way of saying that the woman and the marriage were sacred to him.
I looked again at the photograph that had been taken in front of the bungalow. The elfin girl’s wide smile, with one missing tooth, was a heartbreaker.
“Jesus,” I said softly.
“Let’s split, bro.”
I didn’t want to touch these objects the deceased had arranged around himself, but the contents of the envelope might be important. As far as I could see, it wasn’t contaminated with blood or other tissue. When I picked it up, I could discern by touch that it didn’t hold any paper documents.
“Audiotape cassette,” I told Bobby.
“A little death music?”
“Probably his last testament.”
In ordinary times, before a slow-motion Armageddon was unleashed in Wyvern’s labs, I would have called the cops to report finding a dead body. I would not have removed anything from the scene, even though the death had every appearance of being a suicide rather than a homicide.
These are not ordinary times.
As I rose to my feet, I slipped the envelope — and tape — into an inside jacket pocket.
Bobby’s attention snapped to the ceiling, and he took a two-hand grip on the shotgun.
I followed his gaze with the flashlight.
The cocoons appeared unchanged, so I said, “What?”
“Did you hear something?”
“Like?”
He listened. Finally he said, “Must’ve been in my head.”
“What did you hear?”
“Me,” he said cryptically, and without further explanation, he moved toward the dining-room door.
I felt bad about leaving the late Leland Delacroix here, especially as I wasn’t sure that I would report his suicide to the authorities even anonymously. On the other hand, this was where he had wanted to be.
On the way across the dining room, Bobby said, “This baby’s eleven feet long.”
Overhead, the clustered cocoons remained quiescent.
“What baby?” I asked.
“My new surfboard.”
Even a longboard is rarely more than nine feet. An eleven-foot monster with cool airbrush art was usually a wallhanger, produced to lend atmosphere to a theme restaurant.
“Decor?” I asked.
“No. It’s a tandem board.”
In the living room, the cocoons were as we had last seen them. Bobby cast wary glances upward as he went to the front door.
“Twenty-five inches wide, five inches thick,” he said.
Maneuvering a surfboard that size, even with two hundred fifty or three hundred pounds aboard, required
